Version 0.44

-- I N T R O --

In short this version has much better support for sections, tables and cell merging in tables.

It has been a long time since releases and hopefully this version was worth the wait.  I have been using the library pretty consistently for all this time and have been surprised at how little I have had to add to it despite building quite complex documents.  I have added a few more keyword parameters to various constructors and methods to make things a little easier to use but apart from the change to the left offset with tables all existing code should work with this release.

As always bugs are my fault and any feedback is welcome.

Simon Cusack, scusack@sourceforge.net



-- S E C T I O N S --

In previous versions the RTF generated for a sectioned document was incorrect, most RTF readers seemed to be pretty forgiving and this bug went unnoticed in my earlier testing.  After mucking around and building documents that include lots of sections (in some cases 50 or more) the bug came back to haunt me.  This has been fixed.

I have noticed some strange behaviour in Open Office when opening documents with lots of sections.  For example the subsequent sections can have their margins all screwed up.  Placing the cursor in the body of the document and then double clicking on the edge of the ruler at the top of the page causes Open Office to rejig its pages and this seems to fix the problem.

I have tried to determine if the problem is with Open Office or with my RTF and have been unable to find a problem with my RTF so I suspect Open Office is at fault.  I would love to hear from someone if they can show that it is my RTF as it will be much easier to fix my module than to get Open Office to fix its RTF import routines.

-- T A B L E S --

First the fixes, if you used SetLeftOffset previously then you are going to have to double check the width you are using for the first column of a table.  PyRTF wasn't taking into account the left offset when calculating the left edge of tables.  It now does, so the column width for the first column really is the column width for the first column whereas before it was being treated as the offset for the left hand edge of the column.

Now for cell merging.  I have added support for vertical and horizontal merging of cells, this was a toughy to get right as word likes to really blow up hard when a table isn't spot on in this regard.  There is an example that demonstrates how to get this working.  Note that this only works in Word2000 and up, Open Office, etc doesn't seem to handle it at all.

I have had a request for nested tables, I looked into this and while possible is difficult to get spot on so I opted for merging cells in this release as you can usually do what you need to with merged cells instead of nested tables.  I'll keep it on the list and maybe add it later.
